Vac Verikaitis2015-03-31T18:03:04-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=vac-verikaitisCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Vac VerikaitisGood old fashioned elbow grease.Suarez's Bite Isn't Any More Violent Than an Everyday Hockey Gametag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.55323622014-06-26T13:23:46-04:002014-08-26T05:59:05-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/biting an Italian opponent. He also received a stiff fine, is not allowed to play in Uruguay's next nine international matches, and will miss the start of the domestic season with his club team, Liverpool. His World Cup is over in a most ignominious fashion.

But what did Luis Suarez do that was wrong? It may seem a ludicrous question to many. But compared to the level of sanctioned violence in hockey and North American football, what Suarez did is trivial.

"We didn't choose him to be a philosopher, or a mechanic, or to have good manners -- he's a great player," said Uruguay's president, Jose Mujica, expressing a commonly held belief in his homeland that Suarez was being unjustly vilified. "I didn't see him bite anyone. But they sure can bash each other with kicks and chops."

In that moment, on the pitch, there was no morality, there was only the objective. Annoy. Distract. Italians know the tactic as well as anyone. Marco Materazzi so aggravated Zinedane Zidane in the 2006 World Cup Final that the French captain turned around and hit the Italian with his head. He was red carded. France played the rest of the game a man short. Italy won the Cup. Mission accomplished.

"Soccer is a ritual sublimation of war," says Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in his landmark masterpiece Soccer in Sun and Shadow. "Eleven men in shorts are the sword of the neighbourhood, the city, or the nation. These warriors without weapons or armour exorcize the demons of the crowd and reaffirm its faith: in each confrontation between two sides, old hatreds and old loves passed from father to son enter into combat."

How many sporting moments can completely capture an entire planet's imagination within seconds of it happening? And continue to be the butt of endless jokes, analysis, moral indignation and millions of words shared by the world's press and broadcast across television screens for days on end? Only soccer has that power to transform on a global scale. For good or bad.

The emetic gasp of pretentious disbelief at Suarez' moment of madness, by rooftop journalists 10 stories above Rio's Copacabana beach, could be easily measured with a seismograph attuned to the dull thud of approaching male bovine scatology.

In Uruguay, indeed in all of South America, people may not universally approve of Suarez and his hunger to win, but they certainly understand. It happens.

There's a great story in The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/25/luis-suarez-giorgio-chiellini-violence-deceit that tells the tale of Suarez as a youth player with Nacional, one of Uruguay's top clubs. A championship was on the line and in the final match of the season, with 15 minutes to go, Suárez flew into a Danubio player. The referee showed him a yellow card and Suárez appeared in his face. The ref went back to his pocket for a red. Suárez snapped and head butted the official, who fell to the ground writhing in pain. "He was bleeding like a cow," said a local journalist.

There is that darkness in the shadows that Galeano speaks of so eloquently in his book.

But in this World Cup, an entire continent celebrates the game played their way, on their land, and it is a beautiful thing to see.

"And one fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of a man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball. The ball laughs, radiant, in the air.
He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them."

South Americans think of themselves as one country in ten parts. The great rivalries still thrive, especially between the two giants, Brazil and Argentina. Such is the quality of the television broadcasts that it is clear to see and especially hear that this is a completely unique spectator experience. Different from the gentrified soccer vibe now on display at the major European capitals. The historic exportation of much of South America's wealth applies to soccer as well. The richest clubs buy in bulk from Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. Ticket prices at Europe's biggest clubs have long since passed the line where working class people could imagine being able to afford to go to games.

The fan experience has been more than just an eyeopener for Norte Americanos who have scoreboards and announcers and recorded music to prompt them to scream and shout at sporting events. These supporters represent a way of thinking that is unique in the world; a collective of historical expression.

The Argentina games, the fans, the raucous roar and lyrics in unison; one song recalls the 1990 World Cup and gloats about what they imagine to be a successful invasion this summer.

It runs: "Brazil, tell me how it feels / to have daddy in your home / I swear that even as the years go by / We'll never forget / How Diego dribbled / And Caniggia stuck the needle in/ you've been crying since Italy until today / You'll see Messi / Bring the cup back to us / Maradona is greater than Pelé."

In perhaps his most famous book, Veins of Latin America, Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, Galeano organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. The veins of a continent are comprised of gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. When those veins are cut open, they gush into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe. And for the last 30 years, soccer players can be added to that list.

This wholesale exploitation of its natural wealth by foreigners, the gringos and yanquis, is the most important of all narratives for the people of the 10 countries that comprise the continent. Simon Bolivar was the great leader who led the struggle for independence in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, but it was a rag tag bunch of English railway workers in Argentina in the late 1800s who inadvertently changed the way people transformed their identity. Those workers brought a ball and started kicking it around and the locals were hooked. Football at that moment transcended military and economic might. The game became the currency of personal wealth and identity of the soul. It is why the 2014 tournament has been so magical, despite its sometimes dark twists and turns. It has succeeded on the pitch in the face of yet another in a long line of exploiters, FIFA.

Galeano says:

In countries where soccer has been and continues to be a primordial symbol of collective identity. I play therefore I am: a style of play is a way of being that reveals the unique profile of each community and affirms its right to be different. Tell me how you play and I'll tell you who you are. For many years soccer has been played in different styles, unique expressions of the personality of each people, and the preservation of that diversity seems to me more necessary today than ever before. These are days of obligatory uniformity, in soccer and everything else. Never has the world been so unequal in the opportunities it offers and so equalizing in the habits it imposes. In this end-of-century world, whoever does not die of hunger dies of boredom.

So if you cannot forgive Luis Suarez, or are morally outraged at his actions, understand where he has come from. How his values, and the values of an entire continent, shaped by centuries of slavery, of exploitation, of murderous dictatorships, that these are sobrevivientos, survivors. And soccer is the lifeboat. It is beyond mere passion. It is madness. Those who have spent time in South America know exactly what I speak of.

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]]>The Fix Is In at the World Cup in Braziltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.54926772014-06-14T13:49:10-04:002014-08-15T05:59:05-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
Bribery. Corruption. Match fixing. Social unrest as a result of mismanagement of enormous resources at the expense of schools, hospitals and infrastructure.

The World Cup is a remarkable spectacle, a manipulation of the idea as much as the play. Inside the stadiums, FIFA controls not only the kind of beer you can drink or what credit card you can use, they try and control the way of thinking. "We Are One Rhythm" is the very Orwellian catch phrase the governing body has inscribed on posters splashed outside and inside the stadiums.

"Throughout the backstage area," said journalist Hadley Freeman in The Guardian "there are giant screens that show -- instead of the actual news -- rolling adverts for FIFA that promise FIFA can cure everything, including racism and war, and that is not an exaggeration. "FIFA: Football as a catalyst for change; no football without ethics or integrity" trumpeted a typically 1984-esque email that arrived in my inbox."

Many people in Brazil have responded with their own home-grown messages scrawled on pedestrian crossings and made into beautifully crafted graffiti walls. "There Will Be No World Cup" and "FIFA Go Home" among the most prominent.

At the core of soccer's historical longevity is its unmistakable place in the wider culture. Beyond the ebbs and flows on the pitch, the orchestrated flailing of arms and legs and heads in concentrated rhythm, swaying to the pulse of the gathered throng, is the expressed passion and collective aspirations of the world's working class. If one were to meditate on the game's meaning, the mind would not stray far from the oft-quoted musing of legendary Liverpool manager Bill Shankly who said:

"Some people believe that football is a matter of life and death; I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that."

The World Cup has transformed those romantic notions of the game. The soccer we know today can still be compelling to watch, mystically enchanting on its good days, maddeningly exasperating on its bad ones. Its simplicity is at once its foundation; a match can turn on the brilliance of a single individual, or be dominated by the collective will of its eleven. The romance of the game is still very much alive. And we will watch the World Cup as we always do. Because at the end of the day we still love the game. From the group of kids in an African village playing with a ball made of rags, or a pickup game in a church courtyard in Italy, all the way to the great cathedrals of the game like the Bernabeu stadium in Madrid or the Maracana in Rio; those will always exist in one form or another. Therein lies the grand lament. The micro now subservient to the macro of corporate might and the global governance of the gatekeepers in Zurich who act as if the truth is just a lie undiscovered.

A number of weeks ago, I posted an article titled: "There will be no World Cup." In it I said

"If past World Cups are any indication, look for the hosts to get some help. FIFA wants a show, not protests. They know Brazil has to win to keep people quiet. Dilma Rousseff knows that with a Presidential election coming up later in the year, her chances of winning would be a lot better with a sixth Brazilian World Cup win. A penalty call made or not made. A linesman's flag held up for offside. Or not. It happens. There is precedent."

The opening match saw Brazil get that help. In another match, Neymar might have been sent off for the elbow on Luka Modric. Instead, he scores two goals. The Japanese referee allows a phantom penalty. Brazil win. One popular Brazilian newspaper went so far as to exclaim on their front pages:

"It's all ours: The cup is ours, Neymar is ours, Oscar is ours, Croatia's goal is ours. And so is the referee."

And in the second match of the tournament between Mexico and Cameroon, the referee disallows three goals in the first half alone, two of which were clearly good. It's all there for the world to see. Bad officiating? Or part of a wider nefarious plot?

Match fixing is nothing new in soccer. Former Canadian international Paul James, whom I have known personally since we both went to training camp with the Toronto Blizzard of the old NASL back in 1983, published an autobiographical book called "Cracked Open."

It details the case of the 1986 Merlion Cup in Singapore in which Canada participated. It was shortly after Canada had played in the World Cup in Mexico. The Merlion Cup consisted of teams like China and North Korea, not exactly world powers. Canada was favoured to win.

Four players; Chris Cheuden, Igor Vrablic, Hector Marinaro and David Norman were approached by 'fixers' working for a large gambling syndicate and deals were struck to fix games. James was targeted by the other four, and he agreed to participate. He admits this much in the book.

"While I should have stood up and ran to the management, I instead made a huge mistake. I said yes, I would be part of the fix, which ignited my personal nightmare."

The five would divide a bribe worth a total of $100,000. In exchange, Canada would throw the semi-final against the North Koreans. Canada duly lost 2-0. James had second thoughts, gave his share to the other four, and then reported the whole affair to the Canadian Soccer Association. Five international careers ended that day.

Ralf Mutschke, a former head of the German Federal Police and an executive director at Interpol, is now the head of security for FIFA. He refuses to give the World Cup a clean bill of health and has even identified the matches that carry the greatest risk. In a report by the BBC, Mutschke says that:

"Certain teams and groups have already been identified as vulnerable to fixers
The last round of group matches, involving teams with nothing to play for, are most in danger
Fixers have already approached players and referees. The fix of choice will focus on the number of goals in a match."

For the last two years, Mutschke and his team have been planning meticulously to prevent World Cup games from falling victim to the fixers. "We are not expecting fixers to be travelling to Brazil and knocking on the hotel door of players or referees, but I know there will have been approaches to players and referees," he says.

According to the BBC report:

"...match-fixers are most likely to entice players or referees to influence two betting markets: the Asian handicap and the over-under goals market. More than 99 per cent of wagers in Asia will be placed on these two markets. On the Asian handicap, teams are handicapped according to their form, so a stronger team must win by more goals for a bet to be successful. Over-under markets are simpler. They go to the player or the ref and offer money to throw the match. If he doesn't agree, they go to the next guy," says Mutschke. Gamblers are given the opportunity to bet higher or lower on 2.5 goals, 3.5 goals and so on.

"I would say I am most worried about these two markets," Mutschke said. "The match result is a possibility, but it is much harder to organise because you need so many players. With the Asian handicap or over-under, you may only need the referee or one or two players."

Mutschke and his team intend to speak to every team and match official when they arrive in Brazil for the World Cup.

Let us hope he does his job well.

So far, a cynical mind could say the fix is already in.

MORE ON HUFFPOST:]]>"There Will Be No World Cup"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.53936282014-05-27T12:24:05-04:002014-07-27T05:59:04-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/Nao Vai Ter Copa -- There Will Be No World Cup.

The brain trust at FIFA, the sport's governing body, that operates as if the truth is just a lie undiscovered, awarded the World Cup to Brazil thinking that the spiritual home of the game, a country that has won the tournament a record five times, would do whatever it took to make the 2014 edition a rousing success. But, "for whom?" people are demanding to know.

The protests in South America's largest country underline the popular belief that the cost of the World Cup, the most expensive ever at $11 billion and rising, is coming at the expense of new funding for schools, hospitals, public transport, and thousands displaced to make room for construction related to the World Cup and the upcoming Olympics in 2016.

Angry grassroots movements have sprung up around the country, focusing their efforts on getting people out onto the streets to protest. Social media has been used to inform and organize in ways not seen before. It is now all right to love football, but to hate the World Cup and especially the gatekeepers, FIFA.

Earlier this year, during a congressional hearing held by Brazil's tourism and sports commission, former FIFA World Player of the Year and 1994 World Cup winner Romario, now a popular politician and member of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, said:

"We can't expect anything from FIFA, where we have a blackmailer called (General Secretary Jerome) Valcke and a corrupt thief and son-of-a-bitch called (President Sepp) Blatter."

And while FIFA trots out soccer legends like Pele and Ronaldo to promote the tournament, groups with names like the Landless Workers Movement (MTST), and Urbanos Direitos (Urban Rights) march in their thousands, occupying the land directly around the Itiquerao stadium, in Brazil's largest city, Sao Paulo, site of the opening game between Brazil and Croatia on June 12.

While Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull fill our television screens with the official World Cup song, teachers in Rio and Belo Horizonte, bus and subway drivers in Sao Paulo, oil workers in Cubatao, airport personnel in Guarulhos and garbage workers, the orange-clad "Garis," who are out in force making sure Rio is clean for the tourists, have marched, demonstrated and gone on strike in numbers not seen in a generation. They are drawn together in part by websites like Portal Popular da Copa e das Olympiadas, and by citizen journalist movements like MIDIA Ninja, a Portuguese acronym for "independent narratives, journalism and action," created to galvanize disparate movements across the country.

"The passion for the sport is huge...but things are no longer as before," says Rafael Vilela, one of the founders of the Midia Ninja collective. "There is a new level of consciousness in Brazilians. People want more change, and cannot tolerate the organization of an event like the World Cup to be run from the top down, without considering the Brazilian people, with a totally disproportionate cost to other World Cups in the past."

Midia Ninja and Fora do Eixo (Outside the Axis), a music and cultural collective, have created a community called Cinelandia in downtown Rio, where people can come in, play music, debate, write their blogs, and edit their cell phone videos and post them online. There are edit suites mounted on shopping carts, and portable generators to power them. The protests can be seen live on the internet via Twittercast.

"The democratization of media and information in a country like Brazil where just seven families monopolize all of the television, radio and print media is a big challenge, but that is our motivation," says Felipe Altenfelder, a founder of the FDE collective.

American director Spike Lee has been in Brazil working on a new documentary called "Go Brazil Go," in which Felipe, Rafael and other members of Midia Ninja figure prominently.

"We'll be on the streets, covering all political and cultural movements, the passion for football and this new moment of political unrest," says Vilela. "We have a portal called ninja.oximity.com; a hub that will be able to add content of great quality, taken by hundreds of collectives and networks of communication that will need visibility and access.The portal will have a system of simultaneous translation.''

Among their number is Canadian Nadim Fataih, an activist who has spent three years filming protests in Spain, Greece, and in Tahrir Square in Cairo. "We're going through the first truly global revolution that humanity has ever seen," he says in a trailer posted on YouTube, soliciting funds for his work in Brazil with the "Guerilla" media collective.

Brazilian photo journalist Ana Lira is one of the founders of Direitos Urbanos (Urban Rights). She is from the north-eastern city of Recife, which will hold five games. Working with other journalists and citizen groups, she has meticulously documented the circumstances of the deaths of 27 people (including one journalist) and the wounding of over 300 others during the street protests. Even more troubling to her is the law that was rushed through congress that would classify protestors as terrorists.

According to the international human rights watchdog Index on Censorship, the bill allows for use of force by the military police and punishment for violent actions during demonstrations. A controversial bill was created to punish "infractions" committed during the World Cup. In its text, acts of terrorism are associated with religious or ideological positions, and it also limits Brazilians' ability to strike. The bill was nicknamed the AI-5 FIFA, after the 1968 AI-5 Act, which gave extraordinary powers to the then-President and suspended key civil and constitutional guarantees for over 20 years.

"The most incredible thing is the silence of (Brazilian president) Dilma (Rousseff)," says Lira. "She is the President. She had an incredible history of resisting dictatorships in Brazil, but she is saying nothing about this law and how hard it is for all of us who do not support the World Cup."

Dilma Rousseff was a member of a Marxist revolutionary group following the 1964 military coup d'état in Brazil. She was captured, imprisoned for two years and reportedly tortured. It is a very important narrative for Brazilians. Her complicity in allowing the World Cup to proceed at the expense of the Brazilian poor is seen as a sell-out to the rich.

"There are a lot of people suffering, some have died or become seriously sick because of the removal of many communities," continues Lira. "This week in Recife, one more community was torched. They always say these favelas were burnt by some accident, but all of them had one point in common: they were located in areas that were desired by big constructors."

Even more provocatively, 170,000 security personnel will be on the streets during the tournament, trained in part by forty FBI officers now in Rio de Janeiro, assigned to "anti-terrorist" duties.

But outside the country, does anyone care?

American journalist Dave Zirin has a book published this week called Brazil's Dance with the Devil; the World Cup, the Olympics and the Fight for Democracy. In it he opines that

"this belief that the lion's share of World Cup expenditures are for foreign consumption, while the disruption and pain will be shouldered by Brazil's masses is widespread. Every protest, every rally, every cry of despair is connected to the 'the three D's': displacement, debt and defense. The stats on displacement, debt and defense can be numbing or easy to disregard for outsiders. The numbers on people expelled from their homes vary wildly, but without question, hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable residents in the country have been or will be relocated by either carrot or stick, whether through financial reimbursement or through the barrel of a gun."

Journalist Yan Boechat, whose recent assignments included covering the conflicts in Afghanistan and the Congo, will be covering the protests in his native Brazil for the most influential newsmagazine in Brazil, Revista Istoe.

"If Brazil does well on the field, then perhaps people will be happy and not protest as much," he says. "But if Brazil loses there will be big problems and civil unrest. I think the way we play the World Cup will define a lot of things that will happen outside the stadia. We're going to have protests; that's for sure. But if Brazil fails, they will be much larger. There will be violence."

If past World Cups are any indication, look for the hosts to get some help. Remember South Korea versus Italy in the 2002 World Cup and the Ecuadorian referee who later admitted taking money from South Korean officials? Or the most dubious of all: Argentina's win over Peru by six goals in the 1978 World Cup. The chiefs of the military junta had gathered in Buenos Aires to watch and a Peruvian goalkeeper of Argentinian extraction duly had a nightmare evening. Corrupt to the core.

FIFA wants a show, not protests. They know Brazil has to win to keep people quiet. Dilma Rousseff knows that with a Presidential election coming up later in the year, her chances of winning would be a lot better with a sixth Brazilian World Cup win.

A penalty call made or not made. A linesman's flag held up for offside. Or not. It happens. There is precedent.

"I have spoken and I will repeat here," says Romario. ''Now we have to cheer for Brazil to win on the field, because it would be perfect for football, but off the pitch we've already lost and there is no way to reverse it."

MORE ON HUFFPOST:]]>Auschwitz: "It's Not the Sights so Much as the Sounds"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.49357772014-03-10T17:40:01-04:002014-05-10T05:59:02-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
The yellow, red and green was always around in the house I grew up in. My mother was a great patriot, but unreservedly loved being Canadian. It was the same for most people who had emigrated to Canada in the late 1940s.

My mother very rarely talked about what happened to her in the Second World War. There were short bursts of recollection, little anecdotes of walking for days on end, seeing bodies scattered in the road. Bombed out buildings. Soldiers and military vehicles everywhere.

But the essence of her story was missing. Or not told. I knew as a Lithuanian she was stuck in between the fascists of Hitler and the Communists of Stalin. If you are facing two devils, two giants of oppression on either side, what do you do? How DO you survive?

In my mother's case they walked. Clear across Europe. With a stop in the labour camps in Germany, making war materials in the factories. And after the war, interred in a Displaced Persons (DP) camp.
But what happened? What was it like where you were? What did you see? What did you eat? How DID you survive?

My mother is in a long-term care facility now with dementia. And now I'll never know.

There are few people around left to tell us the stories of a world absorbed by the malignant growth of ideas that would justify killing and the displacement of entire nations, entire cultures, entire peoples. My search for personal answers led me on a trip to the north end of Toronto.

A nice, well-looked after apartment complex. A safe, trouble-free part of town. The doorbell rang and I could hear the shuffling of feet and a resigned "I'm coming, I'm coming" from somewhere inside the apartment. It took a while, and as I stood outside her door I couldn't help but wonder what would this person be like.

When you think of the word "survivor" and "labour camps" there is a mental image of the emaciated figures with the hollow black eyes, and that "thousand yard stare" that soldiers returning from the war describe on people who have been exposed to battle and atrocities.

Obviously the physical aspects of that horror had healed with time. But what about the psychological, the emotional wounds?

She was engaging and friendly, warm and familiar, polite and sharp as a tack.

We talked about my background and I opened my briefcase to show her some papers I had brought with me. Papers from the DP camp my mother had been in in the city of Weisbaden, Germany. Her high school report cards. Her Lithuanian passport. The landed immigrant card from Canada.

Judy looked at the date on the card. "That's exactly one week before I came to Canada," she said. July 17, 1948.

Judy is a Hungarian Jew. The youngest of seven children, Cohen survived the Auschwitz-Berkenau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, a slave labour camp and a death march. Only two other siblings survived.

She was eventually brought to Germany to work in an airplane factory, one of 500 Jewish women who endured a tense environment with Ukrainian and Estonian women who were also forced to work there. An atmosphere of tension borne of the anti-Semitic hatred for the Jews that was prevalent in much of those countries.

"But we ended up putting up with each other," Judy told me. "We had to, it was survival. Many of the women gathered up loose scraps of aluminum that dropped to the floor, and made pots and pans out of them in order to sell or trade to each other for scraps of food and to cook that food in."

That was toward the end of the war. Judy had already been through so much.

"In Auschwitz, people ask me what I remember and I tell them it's not the sights so much as the sounds. There were many gypsies in the camp, but they were allowed to stay in family units. Many women bore children in the camp. And for the most part they were left alone. But one day the Germans moved in and started killing them all. And the sounds of the screaming, you didn't know that people could make those sounds. It still haunts me all those years later."

On Monday, Judy was in New York at the United Nations, speaking to kids from the Pine Bush, New York school district as part of the UN March of the Living Exhibit, entitled "When You Listen to Witness You Become a Witness."

The quote from Judy so impressed the organizers that they used it as their motto.

Jewish students in the Pine Bush district, located 90 miles north of New York City, have complained in recent years of anti-Semitic epithets and nicknames, jokes about the Holocaust, being forced to retrieve coins from dumpsters and physical violence. Fellow students are accused of making Nazi salutes and telling anti-Semitic jokes.

Judy has spoken about here experiences to school kids for many years now.

The exhibit, which was launched on January 28, 2014, includes powerfully moving images and reflections in verse, gleaned from 25 years of March of the Living. The exhibit documents the stories of the aging survivors and their young students who travel to former camps to see what the survivors lived through.
There is also an interactive component of the exhibition that allows visitors to fill out their own pledge of tolerance and compassion which may appear at the UN, and taken on the March to Auschwitz-Birkenau and planted alongside thousands of other plaques.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the holocaust and the genocide of millions and displacement of millions more is that the whole thing, as Judy points out "starts with words."

There is a rise in racist, anti-semitic and fascist thinking throughout Europe. In Judy's native Hungary, the JOBBIK party, whose leader Gabor Vona speaks of getting rid of "gypsy crime", was in London, England in January for a speaking engagement. He was trying to stir things up with the estimated 50,000 Hungarian immigrants living in the city.

The Guardian reports that JOBBIK is Hungary's third-largest party, winning 17% of the vote and nearly 50 seats in parliament. It also has a claim to be Europe's most overtly racist party. A favourite target is Hungary's Roma minority, which could number as many as 800,000. Vona was the founder of the now banned, quasi-military Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard), whose garb and insignia evoke the pro-Nazi ultra-nationalist parties of Hungary's past.

In the Ukraine, the far right Svoboda party are also represented in parliament. They are overtly racist and anti-Semitic. Many of them are the leaders of the current uprising in the Ukraine, and want to shape any future governments to their way of thinking, not necessarily that of the European Union or the United States.

"Hateful ideas lead to hateful actions," Judy warned ominously. "The only hope is that a civilized society prevails."

Judy would know. She was there when words brought about World War Two and genocide. She is a witness. Sadly. my mother can no longer be one. And I'll never be able to ask her.]]>Why Nobody's Watching the Paralympicstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.49231222014-03-10T12:37:42-04:002014-05-10T05:59:02-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
These are the athletes of the Paralympics, and even as Russian president Vladimir Putin continued to be besieged by world opinion he attended the opening ceremonies in Sochi on Friday.

Two weeks ago universal praise for how the Russians organized and carried out the Sochi Olympics began to create a willingness to change decades old perception of the Russian bear. Everywhere people were saying nice things about Russia.

Motoki Yamasaki, an engineer for Olympic Broadcast Services, was one of the few who stayed in Sochi working while the vast majority of journalists, athletes, administrators and television staff left soon after the flame was extinguished.

By then the uprising in the capital of the Ukraine was becoming infinitely more serious.

Motoki posted dozens of pictures of a nearly empty International Broadcast Centre, the mountain cluster, and the main Olympic venues and streets of Sochi. What a different place it was now, he told me on Facebook.

It was ominous, because that's always the way it is just before the Paralympics but especially because of what was happening in the Ukraine.

As the streets of Kiev became a battleground, and Russian troops entered Crimea, the predominant perceptions reappeared.

The world quickly took back any slack they were willing to give Putin.

Sadly, in the case of the Paralympians, the years of training and hard work will largely go unnoticed as the world focuses on the increasingly serious crisis.

My friend and colleague Neil Mallard was the first, and at one time the only, member of the broadcast media who chose to "stay on" following the departure of all the other broadcasters at the end of the "primary" Games. As sports editor of VISNEWS the largest TV News agency in the world at the time it was his job to bring any and all sports to those who wanted it.

Not many wanted the Paralympics. But Neil made the decision to cover them anyways.

Neil attended the forerunner of the modern competition for "disabled" athletes at Stoke, Mandeville, in England, following the London Olympics of 1948. They were called the "International Wheelchair Games" due largely because many of the participants had spinal cord injuries, casualties of the Second World War.

Neil wrote stories, as a young reporter on the Paddington Mercury, about The Guinea Pig Club, which he visited and was made up of patients of Dr. Archibald McIndoe, based at Queen Victoria Hospital in Sussex, who underwent experimental reconstructive plastic surgery during and after the war, generally after receiving burns injuries in aircraft.

"I got to know one of the men quite well," recounted Neil to me via e-mail. "He went on to become the Chief Press Officer to British European Airways. He had a heavily rebuilt face together with badly injured but well-repaired hands. When he first met anybody, he would test their reaction by offering to shake hands. I did not fail the test."

Neither did later generations of Paralympic pioneers.

Call it a true twist of fate but one of the greatest Olympic heroes of all time, the great Ethiopian Abebe Bikila, captured the world's imagination by winning the marathon at the 1960 Olympics in Rome running barefoot. He won the same distance in 1964 in Tokyo.

In 1969 Bikila was involved in a car accident in his native Ethiopia that left him a quadriplegic.
He died four years later of a brain hemorrhage that was a complication as a direct result of the accident.

"Men of success meet with tragedy." Bikila was quoted as saying in his biography that "it was the will of God that I won the Olympics, and it was the will of God that I met with my accident. I accepted those victories as I accept this tragedy. I have to accept both circumstances as facts of life and live happily."

In two weeks we have seen the world change from a place where positive change was possible to the more cynical version that divides rather than unifies. And terrifies.

The athletes we will see in Sochi now, and the attitude of one of the greatest of Olympic heroes is what we could be talking about today.

Sadly, it won't be.

Its been a tough and arduous road but the general public still support the idea of a Paralympics even if they don't watch them. It seems that this year world events have conspired to put them even further down the priority list.

MORE ON HUFFPOST: ]]>TFC Is Just a Small Part of Canada's Rich Soccer Historytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.48719202014-03-02T22:49:31-05:002014-05-02T05:59:01-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
Author Les Jones has recently published a book in "coffee table size" that combines historical and quirky facts that puts the history of the game in this country into context with a pictorial assembly that befits a photographer of his caliber.

It was written before MLSE went wild and started throwing a lot of money around to try and create a championship winning team for the upcoming season. They'd better try something because they've never even made the playoffs in their entire seven year existence in the MLS.

So here's a postscript and analysis that I'm sure would have had a prominent place in the book.

Are Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment telling little porkies to the public about spending $100 million on four players for the upcoming season? You know, porky pies. That's English cockney rhyming slang for "lies." Just taking a little liberty based on MLSE's recent publicity campaign about signing Tottenham's Jermaine Defoe.

You know the one, "It's a bloody big deal" shot in the UK on the streets of London with people spitting up their drinks on hearing the news of Defoe's signing by TFC. The red flags are always raised when virtually every major daily and media outlet in the country report that $100 million figure as gospel and verse without doing the math.

At least I didn't see it and believe me, I looked.

English international Jermaine Defoe from Tottenham Hotspur, American Michael Bradley from Roma in Italy's Serie A, and two Brazilians, Gilberto and goalkeeper Julio Cesar for $100 million? In fact Cesar is actually only "on loan" from Queen's Park Rangers, who were relegated from the English Premier League last season and are now in the Championship, England's second tier of professional soccer.

So I decided to do the math and we'll start by explaining what a "transfer fee" is.

In soccer, you don't trade players, you buy them from another club. The idea is that you buy the rights to employ that player. A player's compensation, or salary, is completely separate from the transfer fee and negotiable once the player switches teams. In North American sports, by contrast, you trade contracts.

So in the rest of the world when you claim to have spent $100 million, it's on the transfer fee alone. The current world record is the 100 million Euros ($152 million CDN) Spain's Real Madrid paid to Tottenham Hotspur for Gareth Bale. Cristiano Ronaldo cost the same club 94 million Euros ($143 million CDN) when he was transferred from Manchester United.

That's a lot of jamon.

But in Major League Soccer, instead of operating as an association of independently owned teams, the MLS is a single entity where each team is owned and controlled by the league's investors. That especially includes transfer fees from abroad, league trading of players and salaries. One could argue therefore, that according to MLS rules, the $100 million figure also includes salaries.

So let's continue with the math.

According to England's Mirror Sport, Tottenham was paid a six million pound ($11 million CDN) transfer fee and Defoe will get a whopping increase on his stipend at Spurs, earning about 90,000 pounds ($167,000 CDN) per week on a four year contract in Toronto.

In total that would make Defoe's cost $45.7 million.

The American publication Pro Soccer Talk reported that TFC paid Roma a $7-$10 transfer fee for Michael Bradley. He will earn $6.5 million per year on either a five or six year deal.

So let's take the maximum figures of a $10 million transfer fee and six years at $6.5 per year.
That brings the total cost of Michael Bradley to $49 million. Total for the two players is $94.7 million. Add Gilberto and Julio Cesar's salaries and you get pretty close to that $100 million figure the media was all too eager to report.

The braintrust at MLSE did a good job at selling it. Hey, at least I got my calculator out and checked. Jermaine Defoe is a good player, an English International, with 153 goals in 429 games in England for West Ham, Bournemouth, Spurs and Portsmouth, and 19 goals in 55 appearances for England.

He still figures in England manager Roy Hodgson's plans for Brazil. But he's 31, an age where most outfield players are past their prime. Bradley is younger, a midfielder, has a good work rate, and he's an American, as the majority of players in the MLS are.

Is he worth that kind of money? I have my doubts but we'll soon find out.

Gilberto is an unknown entity and Julio Cesar is a very good goalkeeper, but if he's so good why did a second tier English team like QPR hand him over "on loan"? He'll probably be backup to Diego Alves of Valencia in Brazil's team come June.

Just to refresh your memory, the MLS was formed after the 1994 World Cup in the USA to develop American players. And the league has, to be fair, developed some good ones. Many of whom will be playing for the USA in this summer's World Cup.

The league hasn't been as good at creating Canadian stars other than, say, Dwayne De Rosario.
The USA is ranked 13th in the world, Canada is ranked 113th, and look a long way away from qualifying for any future World Cups. But it at least looks like long starving soccer fans will have a championship to look forward to.

The first one since the Toronto Metros-Croatia won the North American Soccer League (NASL) Championship back in 1976. Back when I was still playing. That's in Les Jones book too. TFC have a strong fan base, and the signing of these players has been a message that finally MLSE is taking soccer seriously.

Now there's the question of renovating their stadium. And to what ends? Part of the argument is that the popularity of the team means they need more capacity. But its also no secret that MLSE covet buying the Toronto Argonauts of the CFL.

They can argue their case for expanding BMO Field to include the Argos in creating a multi-purpose facility. When the Canadian Soccer Association bid for the right to host the 2007 FIFA Under 20 World Cup, the federal and provincial governments agreed to provide a combined $35 million to fund a new stadium in Toronto for the tournament if the bid was successful.

It was built on city land and called the National Soccer Stadium.

The city of Toronto owns it but it has a management contract with MLSE, who chipped in about $15 million but got that back by selling the naming rights to The Bank Of Montreal and it became BMO Field just in time for TFC's first season in 2007.

MLS commissioner Don Garber has been adamant that expansion teams must have plans for a soccer-specific stadium in place to be granted a franchise. TFC did, but now plans have changed. President Leiweke, in an interview with Toronto Sports radio show Prime Time Sports, and published on the TFC fan website known as "Waking the Red" said:

"We want to try to upgrade some of the concourse, upgrade the premium areas, upgrade the locker room areas. When this stadium was built I think we underestimated the support and the amazing growth that we would see with soccer. So if you look at where Major League Soccer is today and you go to places like Kansas City, New York, Portland, and Vancouver and you see those new stadiums what you begin to realize is BMO quickly became outdated and so we need to upgrade the experience, we need to upgrade the environment."

What he's really saying is we need a place for the Argos to play once we buy them so we have to make the place bigger to accommodate a CFL sized field and that will completely change the place and the soccer experience. And it will all be part of the soccer history so eloquently mapped out in Les Jones' book.

TFC should buy copies from Les and hand them out at the games as a mandatory history lesson on the game of soccer in Canada.]]>Who Are We to Define Democracy for the Ukraine?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.48358372014-02-24T15:42:24-05:002014-04-26T05:59:02-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/most recent Huffington Post blog.

A distinguished professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto, a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center, a Media Fellow at the World Economic Forum, a media advisor to graduate student teams at Singularity University in the NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, she doesn't mention that Ukraine is a country cut in half by cultural and economic division.

There are the Russian speaking, Orthodox people in the eastern part of the country, in the economic driving centers of Ukraine like Kharkiv, Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk. And the more impoverished, largely Catholic, places in the West such as Lviv and Uzhgorod. The capital Kyiv is smack dab in the middle of the country that is divided geographically by the river Dnieper which runs through the center of Ukraine. The people in Crimea, in the south, are pro-Russian.

The majority of Ukrainians want to enter into a partnership with the European Union. They want to choose outside of either Western or Russian influence. That's the essential fact that Ms. Francis doesn't query. People in the Ukraine are aware of the issues and costs of such a deal. Citizens of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland can attest to the fact that it is no sweetheart deal.

The Ukraine first entered into negotiations with the EU as far back as 1998. According to this EU-Ukraine Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) originally signed on January 3, 1998, the EU was obliged to pay Ukraine for welcoming and recognizing the importance of Ukraine's efforts, aimed at a transition of its economy away from a state trading country with a centrally planned economy into a market economy.

It was never ratified.

Exact figures are difficult to come by but 16 years later, Reuters reported: "internal EU estimates shown to Reuters showed the total EU loans and grants to Ukraine between 2014 and 2020 would be at least 19 billion euros ($26 billion), provided Kiev signed the trade deal with the EU and reached an agreement with the IMF. Desperate for cash to cover a big external funding gap, Ukraine turned to Russia, which agreed a $15 billion bailout for Ukraine and slashed the price of gas exports."

As she readily admits, Ms. Francis started a "financial newspaper" in Kiev in the early 1990s, and while she claims it was stolen by "thugs", the former Soviet Union was a wild west at the time in which Western governments were complicit, a free-for-all where corruption was king, and where organized crime and "beeznezmen" ruled the day. For her to claim that Ukraine could "once again slip under the waves of corruption" unless it aligns with the EU is disingenuous at best.

The virtual civil war that erupted in the nation's capital of Kyiv has led to the ouster of the deeply unpopular President Victor Yankovych, and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko is out of jail. Why this particular period of brutal protests occurred at the exact time the Sochi Olympics was taking place has to be questioned. A person of Ms. Francis' intelligence and journalistic skills knows that in any geopolitical hotspot there is no such thing as coincidence.

And while I respect and appreciate her own strongly held belief in the "Orange Revolution" is there not a possibility that said "revolution" was a well thought out political campaign created by elites, those who have a vested interest and the funds to wreak havoc for Russia and especially open doors for Western corporate interests?

Perhaps these same elites believe they are necessary in order to create conditions that would produce individuals capable of being good democratic consumers. Perhaps they believe their control is necessary for the survival and maintenance of democracy itself.

In a previously published post on corruption in Russia, I wrote about Russian journalist known simply as "Latynina." Someone Ms. Francis knows well. She published an article in the Moscow Times in January of 2010 following the elections in Ukraine, declaring that people can't be trusted to vote for their best interests. She wrote:

"Viktor Yanukovych's victory in Sunday's presidential election -- not unlike the victories of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Adolf Hitler -- once again raises doubt about the basic premise of democracy: that the people are capable of choosing their own leader. Unfortunately, only people in wealthy countries are truly capable of electing their leaders in a responsible manner."

A few final questions.

If there was a similar situation in, say, Toronto, and seven police officers had been killed during widespread civil unrest, and scores of other cops had been taken captive, what would the reaction have been?

Yes, the Ukraine is corrupt, perhaps more so than even Russia. There can be no questioning the bravery and commitment of the people who went out on the streets to voice their grievances.

But Ms. Francis' assertion that the "Ukraine has no choice but to join the EU"? Perhaps, as Latynina points out, there is doubt as to whether people know what or whom they are voting for.

There would be considerable debate in Toronto as to Latynina's assumption that "only people in wealthy countries are truly capable of electing their leaders in a responsible manner."

But that's her definition of democracy. People in Canada, people in the Ukraine, must decide themselves.

We shouldn't define for other countries what democracy is or isn't. The people of Ukraine voted Yankovych in, now Parliament has thrown him out.

Rigged vote? Coup d'etat? Probably. Maybe. I don't know.

Are there any guarantees for a fair and transparent election now that Yankovych has been dispatched?
Shady election results aren't restricted to Ukraine. The U.S. Presidential elections of 2004 and the farce in Florida are an example.

By comparison, it could even be argued that in Canada, without proportional representation, the Harper government would not be in power today.

The Conservatives manipulated the system by planning their campaign strategy knowing key seats won would negate their underwhelming popular vote count. But that's our system and its up to us to change the law.

If I was a student in your class, Ms. Francis, these are the questions that I'd ask.

]]>Moral Relativism and the Olympicstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.48048862014-02-17T16:40:35-05:002014-04-19T05:59:02-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
Rhetorical contests were part of the ancient Olympic games. I'm not making this up. If the Olympics are the pinnacle of athletic endeavour, then we must also examine the actions of the participants as a reflection of who and what we believe to be moral and ethical.

Of course I am not the first person to ask the question. Just throwing my two cents in. Rounded off to the nearest nickel.

We're at the point in the Sochi Olympics where we start to look back a little and try and digest all that we have seen and read so far. Upon introspection, the prevailing sentiment has been one of pleasant surprise.
Television has brought us the beauty of the mountain cluster, all blue sky and panoramic vistas. The Caucasus mountains forming the frame in which the snowboarders jumped and twisted and the skiers carved their turns.

The coastal cluster with all the major stadiums constructed so closely together made for intimate interaction between athletes, fans and journalists. The Olympic flame burning brightly at night is a beacon etched in the memory.

Every Olympics television outdoes itself with better quality coverage. How about that helicopter tracking shot of the skiers blasting down the hill for the real sensation of speed? The fabulous High Speed Super Slow Motion (HSSM) replays of the ski jumpers against the stadium lighting that illuminates the blackness of the Sochi night. And my favourite, the superimposition of two competitors on the same portion of the luge and bobsled track and the mountain ski courses that provided each one's position relevant to the others not by time but by actual visuals.

Even the senior sports columnist for the Toronto Sun called the Sochi games Best. Games. Ever. That's the Toronto Sun. Not exactly Vladimir Putin's biggest supporters.

The Russians have spent a whole lot of money, but in relative terms to the potential wealth of the country's natural resources, and to the future of the Sochi area, Putin can argue that it is money well spent.
So what have we learned? That the billions spent by Russia has gone a long way in repairing the prevailing image of an autocratic, corrupt society of billionaire oligarchs and fierce repression?

Not quite.

After the last event at the Paralympics, Putin will go back to running the country. There will be the inevitable cabinet shuffles, the suppression of any attempts by rivals to make a move on Putin's position of authority, a strengthening of state control over Russia's massive natural resources, and most of all the ability to stand tall and say to the world: "How did you like our party? We Russians know what we're doing. So don't try and tell us how the world should be run without including us."

Putin has promised to make Sochi a place where Russia's emerging middle classes could come to play year round. He has a vested interest in the area as a major land owner. He has also nixed the idea of building a casino. Don't want to make Sochi the Monte Carlo of the Black Sea.

There will be a Formula One race there this summer. That's a sign that the area has arrived like a debutante at the world ball.

What else have we learned?

The Olympics has a way of focusing our moral relativism - the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures. So when the Canadian speed skater Gilmore Junio gives up his place to another teammate, Denny Morrison, who fell during the Canadian Olympic trials, and Morrison, who is the better skater goes on to win two medals, did Junio do the right thing? He may never have a chance to race in the Olympics again. It is a once in a lifetime event for many athletes here.

Junio says the decision was his and his alone, although I'm willing to bet that there was some discussion with people from the Canadian Olympic Committee. Olympic medal count is important for future funding.

What of the Canadian cross country ski coach who gave one of his team's replacement skis to a Russian who fell and broke his own ski and couldn't continue? Strictly speaking he is helping a competitor. And the Olympics are about competition which intrinsically involves being selfish.

Is that who we, as suggested by numerous columnists and television pundits, consider ourselves to be as Canadians? Not only exceedingly polite but willing to make sacrifices because we are a moral and ethical people? Coach Justin Wadsworth's moral compass steered him in that direction; he didn't even think about. It was as natural as breathing. The Russian skier looked like a bird with a broken wing flopping around on the ground and Wadsworth did what he thought was right. The Olympics magnifies that, and it makes us all warm and fuzzy to believe that it was the ultimate Canadian way, but in the end it was an individual act of moral and ethical clarity. Moral decisions are made on a case by case basis, and the Olympics is the both the protagonist and the stage.

Some other observations at the halfway point in Sochi.

Not a single doping disqualification. Does that mean athletes have stopped cheating, or are the World Anti Doping Association (WADA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) holding things back for the good of the Games? In an earlier post I told you about the New York Times report in which Don Catlin, the former head of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory, said he and his team discovered three positives near the end of the Salt Lake Games in 2002, but that he and the International Olympic Committee president at the time, Jacques Rogge, had decided against pursuing their cases because "it would raise a huge stink around the world."

There IS doping going on at the Games, whether we like to think so or not. That's not being cynical; it's just the reality of high performance sport. You need an edge; you take it. Is that right or wrong? In a world where you can get a pill for anything that ails you?

Another question.

Will this be the last Olympics that we see women's hockey? It should be. Only two teams have ever fought it out for the World Championship since its inception in 1990, and since women's hockey started in 1998 in Nagano, Canada has been in every final, the U.S.A, missing out only once, losing in a semi-final to Sweden. Canada versus the U.S.A. again this year. Like we all predicted.

This is not a competition. There can be no question of the rest of the world catching up. It's been 20 years and the same two countries fight for Gold. And Canadians go crazy for it. Why?

One last thought.

How is it that the two rivals for the Ice Dance gold, Canada's pair of Virtue and Moir and the two Americans, White and Davis, share the same coach Marina Zoueva? Watching Zoueva sit beside Virtue and Moir with a Canadian team jacket on, then jumping up to watch the American pair and then sitting beside White and Davis in the kiss and cry area? What is that? Pick a side. I guess she needs the money.

Never mind, its been a lot of fun and the marquee games of men's hockey are yet to come. Lots to look forward to yet.]]>Meet the Special Talents Who Run Olympic TVtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.47785142014-02-14T08:16:22-05:002014-04-16T05:59:01-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
There are reasons behind that.

With millions of dollars and the networks very existence at stake nothing is done by chance.
So let me try and give you an insiders look at why and how these decisions are made. Let's start with the Americans and NBC.

As the largest stakeholder in the Games, the National Broadcasting Corporation's dollars and corporate support have catapulted the International Olympic Committee and, by extension, the athletes themselves, into a different stratosphere.

Without television, there would be no Olympics, at least not on the scale we now know it.

ABC set the standard in the beginning, under Roone Arledge in the 60s 70s and 80s. The consummate story teller, Arledge understood that for the American audience, largely ignorant of the many different and frankly, unusual sports, that are part of the Winter Games, storytelling would have to be paramount.

Just showing the Games, without context, could not bring out the emotional attachment with the viewers that is so vital. So Arledge and ABC created the athlete profile, the up-close-and-personal look at the backgrounds of those we would learn to love on our home television sets.

They have everything we now take for granted: music under footage of athletes that made we the viewers feel for them, different camera angles especially the closeup, cinematic techniques that showcased the bold and the beautiful.

"Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport... the thrill of victory... and the agony of defeat... the human drama of athletic competition...This is ABC's Wide World of Sports!"

ABC created the template, CBS took a shot at it but it was NBC that brought in the big money that has changed the Olympics as we know it.

So, back to the question of why NBC prefers tape delayed coverage. First, the obvious. People are at work during the day, and watch television in big numbers at night. Prime Time. Sponsors pay the big money for the 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. time slot. And NBC has over 200 affiliate stations which are not owned by the network and who have their own local programming that they need to fit in to make money. Can't pre-empt daytime shows.

Second, the Americans have always spent the dough to put in their own cameras at the Olympics even when a world feed is available. So by the time the events are over, the American producers on site can choose the best shots, the closeups they've planned on the dominant storyline, and edit them in to create a story that can sometimes transcend live coverage.

And of course, they're going to focus on their own athletes.

American coverage may not always be live, but it's the pinnacle of sports narrative because they have the resources to do it. The CBC has a tenth of the budget that NBC does. They make the best use of the world feed provided by the Olympic Broadcast Services and supplement it with their own coverage of home country athletes.

With far more time to fill than NBC, the CBC producers make maximum use of their resources. Not only have they done a dynamic job of bringing Canadian stories to the forefront, they've recounted the performances of other Olympians from around the world with true depth and aplomb. The telecasts have been clean and comprehensive.

Twitter was in its infancy and hadn't yet changed the way people watch and talk about sports and iPads didn't exist the last time the CBC held Olympic broadcast rights. In Sochi the CBC took on the huge challenge of carrying every competition live and on-demand, while also offering its second screen platform to Olympic viewers.

The executive producer of CBC's coverage is a long-time friend and colleague, Chris Irwin.
We worked together in the news division at the time, when I was going through a particularly acrimonious divorce and other personal issues but it was Chris who had a way of calming me down.

Chris has patience in spades.

He spent two years, in the confines of a sometimes unwieldy system at the Mother Corporation, putting the pieces together for the Sochi Olympics. Not alone of course, the CBC has some really good people.

But imagine dealing with, among other things, time zone differences, features, staffing, on air hosts, where to stay in Russia and most importantly, focus. If there is an unsung hero in these Games, it is Chris for his team building and patience.

"My time is not my own," he told me during the planning stages. Meeting upon meeting and "after a twelve hour day I go home and my kids are in bed. I kiss them goodnight and then I try and sleep and the next day I do it all over again."

Chris is a brilliant man.

The CBC are coming fresh on the heels of the CTV/Rogers Olympic consortium, who were the broadcasters of the London summer games and the Vancouver winter games. A record amount of broadcast hours on conventional, and for the first time in history, digital platforms as well. In different languages. And radio.

The head of the consortium is a guy I once shared an office with at TSN, Keith Pelley, now the President of Rogers Media. Keith's first Olympics was Atlanta in 1996. I remember getting off the plane and getting on the bus to go to our hotel. There was one seat left, and Keith was the last guy on. He sat beside me.

I was working for the CBC, but Keith had been recruited from TSN on loan.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"Boxing," Keith replied.
"You into boxing?"
"I guess we're going to find out," he answered.
Keith is that kind of guy. Give him a challenge and he'll figure it out. And he did. He always does. And he did in Vancouver and London.

"The magnitude of the coverage and the fact that nobody had ever attempted such a robust coverage plan and I think we changed the way the games will be forever covered in Canada," he wrote me in an e-mail. "Our motto of watch what you want, when you want, how you want is now commonplace in Olympic coverage and we were first and very proud of that."

Keith is a standup guy. Always willing to help out where he can. Even when a guy is down and out. I don't forget stuff like that.

One final anecdote. About CBC's prime time host, Ron MacLean. Intelligent, witty, but most importantly sensitive and empathetic. Most people don't know that Ron gives a lot of his time to people and places that most of us wouldn't or couldn't possibly understand.

Ron has donated a lot of his time to the Ve'ahavta Street Academy, an eight-week program at George Brown College in Toronto. The VSA is for people that live on or near the streets of Toronto. This includes persons living on the street or in the shelter system, newly housed, or on income assistance.

This program is for everyone who thought they would like to go back to school, but didn't think it was possible. The Street Academy is designed to motivate and empower individuals to explore education as a way out of poverty or off the street.

Ron is not only the co-chair but also a frequent guest speaker. Even gives his personal cell number in case anyone wants to talk. That's who Ron is. Not just that guy with Don Cherry.

Three people among the many who bring you the Olympics.

Guys I am lucky enough to call colleagues and especially friends.

]]>How Corruption Works in Russiatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.47645912014-02-12T12:34:09-05:002014-04-14T05:59:01-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
And make no mistake, I am not an apologist for the Putin regime. The reason I am a Canadian citizen now is that my grandparents took my mother and escaped the almost certain death that awaited them if they would have stayed in Lithuania and been enslaved by the advancing communist armies of Stalin.

Today, the average Russian would probably invite a foreigner into their homes for a meal and a drink. Just as we like to think we would do.

They invited the world to play and they want us to think well of them.

Foreigners have been taken care of in a most hospitable way. Broken hotel rooms and facilities aside. Russia is different in so many ways, as I will attempt to point out here.

Corruption is so firmly entrenched in the Russian consciousness that its implementation is a virtual art form.

One of the only ways one could survive in the Soviet era was by making side deals for food and survival. Of course at the higher levels it took on new parameters. And that way of living remains as a cultural norm. It is carried out with an aplomb that transcends any attempt to eliminate it.

Western corporations and entrepreneurs found that out when they began making inroads into the wild west that was Russia soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the Presidency of Boris Yeltsin, and later Vladimir Putin.

The Sochi Olympics have turned a spotlight onto this most Russian way of daily living. Yulia Latynina is perhaps the most famous, and certainly one of the most widely read journalists in Russia. She writes for the Novaya Gazeta and the Moscow Times, and is also the most popular radio host at the Echo of Moscow, which some observers describe as "the last bastion of free media in Russia."

To give you an example of how she thinks, "Latynina" as she is most commonly known, published an article in the Moscow Times in January of 2010 following the elections in Ukraine, declaring that people can't be trusted to vote for their best interests.

She wrote: "Viktor Yanukovych's victory in Sunday's presidential election -- not unlike the victories of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Adolf Hitler -- once again raises doubt about the basic premise of democracy: that the people are capable of choosing their own leader. Unfortunately, only people in wealthy countries are truly capable of electing their leaders in a responsible manner."

Her words exhibited a foreboding prescience considering what is happening in the Ukraine today as Yankovich chose to align with Putin's Russia rather than the EU.

An article she wrote late in 2013 for the Moscow Times about the Olympic Torch relay is perhaps the best example of how corruption works in Russia:

"The Olympic torches were manufactured by the Krasnoyarsk Machine Building Plant, or Krasmash, a top-secret facility that produces Sineva ballistic missiles. A torch is a much simpler device than a missile. At its core, an Olympic torch is a cigarette lighter, a cheap commodity product, they are a dime a dozen. The Krasnoyarsk Machine Building Plant charged Russian taxpayers 12,942 rubles ($400) for each of the 16,000 torches it produced, coming to a total of $6.4 million. We do not know the price of a single Krasmash missile -- the government jealously guards that information -- but we do see what they charge for their torches. So the question is this: Are their missiles just as overpriced as their torches?

The authorities have maintained that all payment for the torches went to the top-secret Krasnoyarsk plant. This implies that even if an overpayment did occur, the money would have served as an indirect subsidy for Russia's bloated defense industry.

But the Krasnoyarsk Machine Building Plant did not assemble the torches at all. They were produced by a company called Variant-999, which makes metal-frame furniture, refrigerator and retail display equipment. The only connection that Variant-999 has to Krasnoyarsk Machine Building Plant is that it rents out factory space from the plant.

But how could the top-secret manufacturer of advanced ballistic missiles rent out space to a private company? If the Krasnoyarsk plant is well suited to producing furniture, refrigerator and retail display equipment at a profit, why isn't it manufacturing and selling these products itself? In reality, though, every Russian defense factory has similar private enterprises on its premises. In a typical Russian scheme, the factory director owns a private business on site and pockets all of its profits, while the government picks up the tab for all of its operating expenses. Sometimes, however, the owner of the private business pays the operating expenses but pays next to nothing for rent.

These are classic Russian schemes to siphon large budgetary funds into private hands."

And if corruption inside nuclear missile plants isn't enough to get you thinking, it was widely reported that a baby-faced teenager is the key suspect behind the software that was used in the massive security breach at Target over the holidays.

Seventeen-year-old Sergei Tarapsov created the malware and sold it for $2,000. As many as 110-million Target shoppers had their credit card details stolen after a computer program was written to collect the credit card details of shoppers.

Andrew Komarov, CEO of InterCrawler, an internet security firm, didn't accuse the young man of the Target heist but said he believes he developed the software used to skim credit card numbers and other personal data from millions of Target shoppers.

The malware, known as BlackPOS, has been downloaded at least 60 times since it was created, Komarov said.

"But we shouldn't treat him as a criminal," he said. "He should be regarded as a genius."

And so it is in Russia.

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]]>Doping and Passports in Russiatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.47579432014-02-11T11:24:43-05:002014-04-13T05:59:01-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
That's the drug that made cycling (in)famous.

A report in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/sports/olympics/athletes-change-but-stain-of-doping-lingers.html?hpw&rref=sports&_r=0
and also in several Russian publications http://www.profile.ru/obshchestvo/sport/item/78821-zavtrak-dlya-chempionov
say that biathletes are "always at the center of looking for new drugs."

In the Times report, Don Catlin, the former head of the U.C.L.A. Olympic Analytical Laboratory, said he and his team discovered three positives near the end of the Salt Lake Games, but that he and the International Olympic Committee president at the time, Jacques Rogge, had decided against pursuing their cases because "it would raise a huge stink around the world."

Interestingly the report goes on to say that billionaire Mikhail D. Prokhorov, who is majority owner of the NBA's Brooklyn Nets, has poured millions of dollars into the Russian biathlon federation, of which he is also President.

German broadcaster WDR sent two journalists to Moscow to buy a powerful drug called full-size MGF, which increases muscle size and strength but has been tested only on animals. They said the person who sold them the drug, which is not detectable using current anti-doping drug screenings, was a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

An ironic twist is that Canadian figure skaters in Sochi have been among the most tested athletes by WADA, the world anti-doping agency. Figure skaters. And if you can't get the good dope, you get athletes from another country and make them Russians.

Viktor Ahn, formerly Ahn Hyun-Soo, is one of the world's best short track speed skaters. He won three golds and a bronze in 2006 in Torino, and is also a five time overall World Champion.
Injury prevented him from competing in Vancouver, and then a long standing dispute with South Korean officials saw him change allegiances and become a Russian citizen in 2011.

''In Korea, they're all about quantity and technique,'' said Steven Bradbury the first Australian to win a Winter Olympic gold medal after all of his opponents were involved in a last corner pile-up in the 1000 metre race in 2002 at Salt Lake City.

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/sport/winter-olympics/unlikely-russian-viktor-ahn-aims-to-be-the-last-skater-standing-20140208-328km.html Bradbury said "He's now in the Russian system, which is governed by Canadian coaches and they're all about speed and strength. He's a lot bigger. A lot more muscular than he used to be, that's for sure. His form this year means he will be one of the big contenders for the gold."

At the European Championship in Dresden last month, Ahn won overall gold and two silvers, but his main rival, Sjinkie Knegt of the Netherlands was far from happy with defeat. Knegt gave Ahn two middle finger salutes at the end of a race and also tried to kick the Russian.

Knegt was disqualified.

On Monday, Canadian Charles Hamelin took Gold in the 1500 meters, while Ahn took bronze. Many not familiar with the back story did a double take when Ahn picked up the Russian flag and celebrated his first medal for his adopted country.

Ahn's next race will be in the 1000 meters on February 13.

Another athlete who took Russian citizenship is snowboarder Vic Wild. A few years ago, Wild said he had "no money and no future" in the sport he loves. The game-changer? A Russian passport.

A lifelong snowboarder from the West Coast of the United States, 27-year-old Wild is the only US citizen competing for Russia at the Games -- and one of Russia's big Olympic hopes in a sport where it has little experience.

Wild, by the way, is the husband of Russia's world champion in parallel slalom Alyona Zavarzina.
Alec Glebov, while born in Slovenia, became a Russian three years ago.

He insists it is a natural transition as he has a Russian grandmother and his parents spent a lot of time living in St. Petersburg.

Glebov provided a glimpse of what Russian fans can expect from their best skier in Sochi when the 30-year-old continued his season-long improvement and finished 51st in Wengen in January.
But when the Motherland calls, you have to answer.]]>Westerners Are Being Too Critical of Russiatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.47578142014-02-10T16:55:32-05:002014-04-12T05:59:01-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
I've read the great literary works of Solzhenitsyn and his chronicles of the Gulag Archipelago, and Sholokov's tales of the Cossacks. Tolstoy and Doestoevsky. Boris Pasternak and Dr. Zhivago. I have a natural affinity for Russian culture. So let me try and explain what I know of today's Russia.

Boris Yeltsin presided over the reckless privatization of Russia's assets when the Cold War ended. But complicit in this plunder was the West. Banks like Credit Lyonnais and CitiBank were among the first Western corporations to open branches in the new Russia.

In Washington they saw the dismantling of the Soviet empire as a way to shape an ally in their own image, and for a time Russia was like a Wild Wild West, something the Americans understand.

While Yeltsin was in power there was deepening inequality, mounting unrest, social disorder and at one time an attempted coup by the Old Guard of communist sympathizers and generals.
So while Russia's vast natural resources allowed a few to become obscenely rich, there was an increasing popular call for the restoration of law and order.

"To regulate the heist and limit the damage," Marwan Bashar of the Al Jazeera network pointed out in an excellent documentary called 'Putin's Russia,'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZcUsdARY6o"a new brand of centralization through authoritarian rule and populist nationalism was introduced in Russia by the Yeltsin clique in 1999"

And as history records, Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer and later deputy mayor of St. Petersburg rose to the top of that clique and eventually the presidency. He's not subtle. He has one message: Putin equals power.

Yeltsin was portrayed in the West, and for good reason, as a drunken clown who let the oligarchs run Russia. Putin's message is that with him in charge, Russia is strong. And that translates to the Russian people having power.

But with so much of Russia's power based on its energy reserves of natural gas, oil and minerals, the economy is still at the mercy of the global commodities markets. Putin knows Russia doesn't live in a global vacuum, but he also knows that he must continue to project power to his people.

To him, all politics is local.

And that is why the Olympics are so important to Putin, and by and large to the people of Russia. They are all too acutely aware of how the world sees their homeland, as a totalitarian state of brutal masters and lowly slaves.

Ask any foreigner now in Sochi how they are being treated and they'll send back glowing reports of friendly people eager to please. Russians are, contrary to popular belief, very accommodating to guests. Not in the Soviet era, they weren't allowed to be.

But yes, they are as eager to please as any host nation is.

Most journalists, myself included, have nothing but fond memories of the reception that was afforded to everyone who visited the tiny town of Lillehammer during the 1994 Winter Olympics. The best part about it is that it was not contrived, it is just who Norwegians are.

Two years later in Atlanta at the summer games, one could get free Coca Cola almost anywhere, but that was pretty much the best thing one could say. Transportation nightmares (except for the VIPs and friends of the IOC family), poor organization at the venues and of course a terrorist bombing in Olympic Park, (despite a massive security presence), were the legacies of the 1996 summer games.

There is much to criticize in Russia, but going through the international press, especially in North America, one would think that the most important thing people should be thinking of is Russia's gay rights policy. A friend of mine, Brian Passafiume, who is no longer in the television industry and lives in Alberta, has been following my posts and wrote this:

"In a country where people still mysteriously vanish over political views, journalists are bullied and often brutalized when they tout an editorial view that goes against state policy, and police turn a blind eye towards roving gangs of extremists who terrorize and often kill minorities (while posting videos on the internet), gay rights are among many human rights issues that plague modern Russia.

As well, it's equally abhorrent that you're branded a bigot if you think that Russia's anti-gay policies aren't more important than other human rights issues."

Does he have a point?

One of my "go-to" daily news sites is The Guardian in the UK. I read it mostly because they have excellent soccer writers and anyone who knows me understands my passion for the game. But they also have a political bent that speaks to my world view.

The Guardian is fervently anti-racist and great defenders of gay rights, but in their letters section have been receiving mail that echo the perception that the point has been made, sometimes too stridently.

"Can we please see an end to the publication of hysterical, hypocritical and at times frankly racist protests about Russian treatment of LGBT people? Russia is not Nazi Germany and, given that an estimated 20 million Russian people died fighting Nazism in the second world war, such comparisons are deeply offensive to the population of that country -- whatever their sexuality. Gareth Edwards (Letters, 7 February) is the latest to draw comparison but, as far as I know, LGBT people in Russia are not barred from professional occupations, denied access to education, or expected to wear identifying stars on their clothing. Nor are they being detained in camps, whereas by 1936 the concentration camps were certainly in evidence -- Sachsenhausen just outside Berlin was opened the same year."David Hodgetts
Burnley, Lancashire

My posts about the Sochi Olympics are about reaching out to people of differing viewpoints from as broad a spectrum as I can gain access to. It is too easy to find things wrong with Russia. They can find plenty wrong with the West. Corruption? The Russians would say that's always been the way its done. One shrugs one's shoulders in that uniquely Russian way of showing resignation, figures it out and lives with it.

We don't have a history of Western-style democracy, they would say. We knew the Tsars, then the Bolsheviks, then the Communists, now the Oligarchs. And what do you call your banking meltdown and credit default swaps and the rule of corporations. Is that not corruption as well?

And can we really say much about inferior construction and poor water supply? Is that something we can criticize when entire populations of Aboriginal people are at this moment living in ATCO trailers in Canada?

Putin is all too aware of the fact that the Russian people are dying off at an alarming rate. Male life expectancy is only 59 years. Too much drinking. At this rate, Russia is set to lose 50 million people in the next 40 years. This is a country of 143 million in the largest land mass on earth.
A catastrophe is in the works.

Russians know it and they are scared. Putin reassures them.

The Olympics, with the incredible pictures beamed around the world of athletic endeavor and Russian flags, has been a message to the world. Rightly or wrongly that's what Putin's populist agenda has promised and is, so far at least, delivering.

Still two more weeks to go, though.

]]>Welcome to Russia, and Let the Games Begintag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.47475892014-02-07T17:45:27-05:002014-04-09T05:59:01-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
More than 2,000 performers were part of the Sochi 2014 opening ceremony held at the Fisht Olympic Stadium. Some 40,000 in the stands, mostly VIPs and international dignitaries. Millions more watching on television.

Much was made of the absence of world leaders like U.S. President Obama, Prime Ministers Harper of Canada and Cameron of Great Britain, and Chancellor Merkel of Germany.

And who was leading the dancing? Russia's faux-lesbian singing sensation couple Tatu. Remember them?

Who cares if it's a song from French artists, it's damn good. It's not like Russia is blooming with good music anyways. Classical music the exception of course.

This is a country who gave the world Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakoff, Shostakovich and Prokofiev, for example.

So now we're all wearing giant flashing medallions while the Interior Ministry sing "Get Lucky." In no way camp at all!

DJs are big in the Olympics ever since Ken IIshi of Japan tore it up in Nagano in 1998, Tiesto did an hour and a half set in Athens in 2004, and Deadmaus and Armin van Buren did gigs all over Vancouver in 2010. These guys know how to work a room and when the world is your stage -- well -- the groove is tantalizing.

A small technical glitch happened when a giant snowflake failed to open to create the third ring on the top row of the five-ring Olympic logo.

No biggie.

Hey, in Vancouver the cauldron was complicated and Catriona Le May Doan sat there waiting to light it but it never came. And Wayne Gretzky hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck in the pouring rain to light the official Olympic torch which was then sealed off from the public by a big fence.

Hey, a lot of people are nervous about terrorist threats and the brains in the American security services really outdid themselves by warning the world to watch out for explosive Crest and Colgate. Now how are you going to get your kids to brush their teeth? The Russian press are having a field day with their outrage at how the Western press are portraying Russia.

Oh, and they're sick and tired of hearing about Pussy Riot too.

At the end of the day, we have two weeks of beautiful television pictures and sure-to-happen controversies surrounding judging calls or poor performances

And there will be spectacular ones as well.

And in Canada it's all going to hinge on hockey, but that's what the Russians are looking forward to as well.
And hockey no doubt will be the crown jewel of the Games, with a standard of play that is unequaled even in the playoffs.

So good on the Big Russian Bear and on with the Games!

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]]>The Great Journalistic Minds Out in Sochitag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.47262632014-02-06T09:37:52-05:002014-04-08T05:59:01-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
Seeing that this is Russia, the answer, no doubt, is yes. But I digress.

My goal is to provide a fresh and unique take on the Games from a number of very informed perspectives. There is, as you can well imagine, a large contingent of Canadians involved in the Winter Games, from athletes and administrators to broadcast professionals.

They are the best at what they do.

And like the athletes, many of them have been training for years just for these two and a half weeks in Russia. I'll be in touch with many of them and pass on their viewpoints as best I can.

But two of my sources are friends I've had for decades. And they've been invaluable in providing context and perspective. Helping me through millions of words in Russian langauge publications is Alex Schnerer. His story of getting to Canada duing the Soviet era reflects the current discrimination in Putin's Russia.

Alex was born in Kyiv, in the Ukraine, which was then part of the former Soviet Union. He is university educated with a Bachelor's Degree in Economics and a minor in Journalism.

"As a Jew and a dissident I had no future in Russia" he told me.

"At that time, the State antisemitism had reached its peak. I was a stranger in my country of birth. I had to enter University, which had some quota for Jews, though it wasn't my University of choice despite finishing school with a Gold medal as best student. I played for the Dynamo Kyiv Under 13 soccer team and the whole team had a trip to East Germany. I was the only one who was left behind. Even at the age of 13, they were afraid that I would have defected but... to where?"

Alex was a "refusenik." The term refusenik is derived from the "refusal" handed down to a prospective Jewish emigrant from the Soviet authorities. He and his wife waited nine years. Alex told me more.

"Gorbachev's arrival gradually changed the situation and in 1988, we were allowed to leave the country. Three of us (my little son Greg was born in 1984) left the country with $200 in our pockets. The Government took our apartment, my library, furniture, etc. We had to leave our entire life behind. We arrived in Italy and from there, we applied to go to Boston. One day we were called to the Canadian embassy for an interview with the Canadian consul. He urged us to go to Canada, told us about the country and said that Canada needs people like us. We made up our minds."

Alex wrote me a letter while I was in charge of the soccer programming at TSN. We arranged to meet and afterwards I hired him to work with me as a researcher and production assistant. He stayed at TSN for almost two decades before moving to Sportsnet.

We've remained friends since.

But like many of us, Alex became part of a numbers game as Rogers started laying off employees and is now going through unemployment, capitalist style. I learned a lot from Alex and his dignified way of maintaining his bearings.

My other great source is Neil Mallard. He's 83 years old and still going strong. He is one of only a few people in the world who have been to almost every Olympic Games, both Winter and Summer, since 1948 when he was a cub reporter for a local newspaper at the London Games. He went on to hold the post of the first sports editor at the largest television news agency in the world, VISNEWS (now Reuters TV). Neil was also a close associate to the members of the General Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF), an umbrella organisation for all (Olympic and non-Olympic) international sports federations. Neil developed and went on to maintain extremely close friendships with many of the GAISF Presidents.

Neil was one of those guys who knew EVERYBODY.

Neil told me that if GAISF had acted quicker, they might just have given the IOC a run for its money in terms of Olympic control, but this was before the 'big money' offers that first ABC, and later NBC made for the exclusive North American Olympic TV rights, which took the IOC from near bankruptcy to rolling in cash. The IOC have obviously never looked back since.

Neil also sat on the Olympic TV Commission for a number of years and contributed to the subsequent refinements of the TV rights contract -- which the IOC went on to 'roll-out' world-wide. That same formula was what Neil went on to explain, in detail, to one Bernard Charles Ecclestone, the man who took Formula One from a weekend past time for speed-freaks to one of the richest sports in the world, thanks in no small part to the management of, and in turn the exposure, that television brought, and continues to bring, to the sport and its financial partners, the indispensable 'sponsors' who pay to make the "wheels go round and round."

Neil organized the television uplink paths for events like Live Aid in 1985. At that time it was unprecedented, doing live concerts on two continents and beaming the 'feed' to the four corners of the globe. He was one of the first people to start experimenting with specialty cameras, including ones fitted to race-cars.

Neil regularly went inside the Iron Curtain. He was one of the few people trusted by the Soviets, for his experience and contacts and especially because he knew how to be discreet and when to keep his mouth shut.

It's what got him safely in and, perhaps more importantly, out of places like North Korea in one piece when he traveled there in 1979 to televise a table-tennis championship. That's the kind of personality that stays alive in tough places. That was Neil. It still is.

Neil has less-than-fond memories of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

The months he spent inside the Soviet Union took a very real toll on his health because of poor quality and inadequate food, coupled with an endless round of problems and unnecessary challenges thrown up by the organizers.

This meant that it took months for Neil to fully recover his strength after returning to his home in Western Europe after the Games were over. Sixty-five countries including the USA and Canada boycotted the 1980 Games because of the USSR's invasion of Afghanistan.

And what did it prove?

The Russians boycotted the 1984 games in Los Angeles and years later the Americans invaded Afghanistan.
The only ones who suffered were the athletes who had trained for years to get to the Olympics but couldn't because their government said so.

The only positive note was that the athletes organized so that in later years they did have a say in what would happen. Neil won't be going to Sochi. He's earned the rest. I wonder what it's like sitting at home watching the Olympics on television and knowing exactly how things went down?

Neil knows.

I remain pals with Neil's eldest son Tim, who, like his father, is a consummate gentleman and yes, he's also in the TV business, too.

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason."

Many will recognize these words from Hunter S. Thompson. And in many ways he's spot on. But on occasion you get to work with some really good people. And I trust that my posts for the Sochi Olympics will reflect the integrity, skill and knowledge of the people I call friends and colleagues.

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]]>Sochi 2014: Women's Hockey Survives Because it Makes Moneytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.47258242014-02-05T12:58:14-05:002014-04-07T05:59:01-04:00Vac Verikaitishttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/vac-verikaitis/
Women's hockey at the Olympics debuted in 1998 in Nagano, Japan. The USA were the first to strike gold. The USA and Canada played in three of the four gold medal games. Canada has won gold in the last three Olympics.

Former IOC President Jacques Rogge gave serious consideration to dropping women's hockey from the Olympics for one simple reason. With only two countries competing for either the World Championship or the Olympic gold over the last 24 years, it can't be called a competition.

In fact its always puzzled me as to why Canadians continue to get so worked up over a success story that only involves two teams? This is not to criticize the women's commitment to training and their sport. Their dedication is clear. But the reason why women's hockey is still in the Olympics is money. And the Americans provide most of it.

Since their first telecast in 1960, the Olympic games have enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with television. TV has popularized the event to the point that the global audience is now estimated at one billion viewers.

Over the years, however, American television networks have become mired in a high-stakes bidding war for broadcast rights. The stiff competition has kept rights fees inordinately expensive and, as a result, America contributes much more money than any other country to support the Olympics.

In 1996, for instance, the summer games in Atlanta were priced at $456 million, a figure that did not include the cost of the production itself, which has been estimated at another $150 million. All of the Western European nations combined paid $250 million in fees for the same games.

NBC paid the International Olympic Committee a record $1.18 billion for the U.S. broadcast rights to the 2012 London Games and $4.38 billion for the four Olympics from 2014-2020. It paid $775 million for the Sochi games. They've already sold $800 million in ads and are on track to sell over a billion dollars in ads.

That's a lot of bread. And the big player says what goes. The US women's hockey team is starting to dominate the (two country) sport. Americans like to watch their own win. So the game stays.

The conditions now surrounding the televised contests derive from increased attention to the Olympics that began in the late 1960s. The games first attracted a significant television audience during the 1968 summer games when Roone Arledge was at the helm of ABC Sports. The combination of his in-depth, personalized approach to sports broadcasting (embodied by ABC's Wide World of Sports) and the technological advances in the field, such as satellite feeds and videotape, set the standard for Olympic telecasts.

Utilizing inventive graphics and personal profiles of the athletes, Arledge slated forty-four hours of coverage, three times as many hours as the previous summer games. He packaged a dramatic, exciting miniseries for the television audience and successive producers have continued to expand on his model.

The 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany showed further growth in costs and coverage. However, the drama of the games was overshadowed by the grisly murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. Viewers watched in horror as the events of the 5th and 6th September massacre unfolded, and television turned into an international forum for the extremist politics of the Black September Organization. This event provided the single worst tragedy in the history of sports broadcasting.

The Olympics have also given American television sports some of its most glorious moments and endearing heroes. Few will ever forget the U.S. hockey team's thrilling victory over the Soviets in 1980, Nadia Comenici's perfect performances. Canadians remember Donovan Bailey in 1996. It helped diminish the bitterness of the Ben Johnson drug scandal in Seoul in 1988.

And Vancouver was a seminal moment in Canada's history as Canadian athletes finally erased the dubious dishonour of never having won a gold medal on home soil by wining 14 of them. Aside from catapulting the athletes to media stardom, the Olympic games are a ratings boon for their host network. Customarily, that network captures 50 per cent of the television audience each night for the two-and-a-half weeks of the Olympic telecast.

Furthermore, this habitual pattern establishes a relationship between the viewers and the network which translates into increased ratings for regularly scheduled programming. This springboard into the new season, along with the hefty sums commanded by Olympic advertising time are the reasons that the broadcast rights are so sought after and so expensive.

In Canada, CBC/Radio-Canada announced on Aug. 1, 2012, that it had won the Canadian media rights for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, and the 2016 Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The CBC has previously broadcast the games 19 times.

The deal came more than a month after CBC and Bell Media announced they would no longer submit a joint bid for the rights. The exact figure was not disclosed but it was sure to be far less than what the partnership between CTV Inc. and Rogers Communications -- later to be formally known as Canada's Olympic Broadcast Consortium -- paid for the rights to the Vancouver and London Games.

The International Olympic Committee, the Games' governing body, said the winning bid was $153 million.
Which leads us back to the beginning of this post. And the fact that there is an excellent possibility that Canada and the USA will once again play for the Olympic gold medal in women's hockey. Television executives in both the USA and Canada will be happy.

Adweek magazine in the US points out that NBC Universal forked over some $775 million for the media rights to the 2014 Sochi Olympics, but if history is any guide, the network is all but certain to recoup the cost of its original investment. NBCU could be on track to rake in around $1.05 billion in overall ad sales revenue, an estimate arrived at by multiplying the average cost of a 30-second spot in the 2002-10 Games ($95,500) by as many as 11,000 30-second units that are carved out of the Sochi coverage.

And you can bet that its the blue chip sponsors who will be paying top dollars to advertise during the women's hockey final hockey. Because we already know who will be there.